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Whoa. New DSLR Support Rigs

We've seen some competition on DSLR support rigs from Hong Kong and Korea. Now it looks like another Chinese company has been listening to the sales of DSLR's. Just received a tweet today from @jphansen about this new line of DSLR Support rigs soon to be coming out of China. The rigs looks very well designed, and should be since they are close to another popular brand with the blue accents. Everything else on the different rigs have gone with solid black. Not much word on the build quality, but these are the same guys who slap their name on the 717AH Fluid head which seems like a decent build. I'm expecting these to be cheap cheap cheap.

They've seem to come up with an entire lineup of many different accessories including Gearless follow focus, Matte Box, Shoulder Supports, DSLR Cages, Handles, and of courses Rods, Clamps, and mounts. Prices, not sure of just yet, but i'm hoping it's something much more affordable than what's currently available. If anyone catches these for sale on the web, holla at your boy! I'd be interested in seeing more of this.
Here's the link: http://www.chinafancier.com/enindex.asp. If you like this article, Tweet it.

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34 thoughts on “Whoa. New DSLR Support Rigs”

I live in Shanghai and had one in my hand yesterday, at the Xietu Lu / Luban Lu store. The quality is meh. It's a lot of plastic and the screwing knobs felt as if I was going to break them off while I was trying to make it more stable. They wanted 975 dollar for the big one, FTV-200D, but it felt way overpriced. I think if that price goes down to 500 dollar or in that area it makes more sense. Also, the filter holders in the matte box were kind of... loose. Just didn't feel like very good quality overall.

Totally agree with you Emm, Express35 website is not helping making a decision… It's hard to find the ideal configuration even though they seem to have some great gear.
Chris should work on that (not to mention answering the mail I sent him 3 weeks ago…)

I used to talk about the Korean Gini Rigs, which were fairly inexpensive at the time they were released. They were great deals. Now i'm finding the Express35.com basic rods, clamps, and handles to be cheaper with same quality.

Express35 can configure just about any rig you can imagine using custom rod lengths. The only problem i'm finding with their website is it's not easy to imagine complete rigs. If there were tons of different styles already put together, i'm sure more people will find one that fits their needs. Once you have a base rig, you can always build up from there.

I started a summer project to build a rig for my Canon T2i. After looking at all of the Jag35, Zacuto & Redrock Micro stuff I felt like I wasn't gonna be able to pull off the type of rig I wanted. So I did research and Google searches for the term "DSLr Rig" What I found gave me hope that I could build one. I started out on eBay, one guy who made these rigs himself (Gini) I had come to hear about offered a rig called the "DSLr 1600" it had a starting bid price of $250.00 bucks so I bid $300.00 not expecting to win but I won for $250.00. 7 days later I had my rig. I'm no rocket scientist but I have had lots of experience with audio hardware. I didn't expect much from the Gini rig but I was very surprised by the quality of the materials, finish and build quality of this thing. Gini puts these things together with so many extra parts I eventually figured out how to build the rig more compactly getting rig of a lot of the extra hardware. In fact I could build a small run and gun rig with the extra parts I have If I wanted to. I own a Zacuto gorilla plate and when I hold it and the Gini parts in my hand It's really hard to tell the difference between them. Additional parts that where purchased for the rig where the DSLr cage, step down brace and a D|focus from Jag35.com a Matte Box from PROAIM (India) and some BMX grips that I ordered off of Amazon. I love the rig that I Frankensteined together and for the less than $1000 bucks I spent on it I could not be more happier about it. Jeremy, you are grossly uninformed.

You will never see shoulder rigs at Walmart prices because there is simply not enough volume. The market is actually very small.

I think we've all seen similar gear before from India, Korea and other companies in China. I don't expect these to be any different in terms of price and quality overall which overall is pretty good. I'm cautiously optimistic though.

If I could have built in China and managed quality like I can here, I would of. In fact, I spent thousands on Ebay buying gear just to see who was building quality parts. Shipping costs is what.

The idea that China can not build quality gear is old thinking. Just like here in the USA, there are crappy machine shops...bad service...language barriers.

Express35.com has always been about one thing...Service. My parts are well made but understated. Nothing flashy. I simply do what I say and say what I do. The sad part is that it is rare.

My guess is that the pricing will be around what's out there right now in terms of "low-cost" rigs/accessories like Jag35, Express35 and so forth, which of course is "cheap" compared to the bigger brands out there but nowhere near the "china pricing" we're all hoping for so much.

I would love to build most of the stuff Fancier offers. But how? No matter how much I read on Emm's blog (which is fantastic), no one can seem to get 15mm (standard) rods for cheap... they're all like $30 for one foot-long rod.

We need more information (including a detailed parts list and instructions) on how to build stuff like this.

I just bought an ebay rig recently that I believe I paid too much for as I found information about it on a blog post at this very site, from months earlier, basically the day after it arrived. I feel like such a chump. But then again, it doesn't have the standard rail size... that's what I'm mainly interested in building, since so many accessory clamps and mounts require that 15mm size, and 60mm width.

Anyone have any ideas? I would love to build a ton of these and show exactly how it's done via Vimeo and YouTube, to let the world save money, and do greater good for the whole art of indie filmmaking.

I agree with Neil. Hasn't Emm shown us what can be achieved and how much money can be retained if we don't fall sucker to the designer brands. You can't tell me ANY DSLR cage for $300 and $400 operates any better than the one Emm posted on this very blog. I've tried those others and compared it to my DIY and there is no difference. I ended up building THREE rigs with the materials left over. ($50 bucks in materials) Now there are 2 more new DSLR users in the world that won't have shaky videos on YouTube!! LOL

And yes, I am of course kidding (I'm a British ex-patriot living in Canada). I agree with the poster above - lets hold the negative criticisms on this rig until a) we have a price and b) someone reliable has actually had a decent chance to test it out. No way of telling if its good or garbage from a picture...

Regardless, this is good because it provides competition and even if it turns out to be cheap trash it still gives those breaking in to DSLR field a chance to try it out without blowing an entire paycheck.

Not sure why people are convinced they have to spend entire paychecks on simple machines that can be more expensive than the camera they're mounting it to. This auxiliary stuff could be made obsolete by new camera designs too so why spend so much, it's a con. I believe the real money may be in selling gizmos to aspiring yet gullible people.

I have to say the comment from Jordan is very typical, too bad, I have bought many things from China and never had a problem with the camera/video accessories, as for the build quality how can you tell that its inferior from the photos ?
looking forward about pricing and more info!!

Posted this on DVX last week and contacted the US distributor over the weekend. He didn't have any updates on pricing or timing, this stuff is brand new. Hopefully we see it sooner rather than later and competition is always good. Glad they are going fully modular!

The follow focus and hand held rig are total copies of Bruce Dorn's stuff. Not that I care too much as his stuff is too expensive for reality just like Zacuto's and Cinevate's stuff. Apparently, there's a distributer in Burlingame, Ca.